I’m beginning to understand what comes naturally to me, the strengths that I can build on for an excellent career. One of the things that I’m good at and working on getting even better at is information development. This week, I started on a wiki that’ll document some of the best practices we’re learning at IBM for using these emerging collaborative technologies. I loved figuring out a structure and filling it in with tips and examples that I’ve seen. I’ve also been working on my book, and I’m now up to 13 raw pages. I’ve still got a long way to go (35 pages due by Dec 31!), but it’s a lot of fun explaining (and re-learning!) the things I picked up over the last six years. (Has it really been that long?) I enjoy writing and talking about what I’ve learned because I learn even more along the way. =)

Another strength that I exercised and developed this week was that of connecting. I had a number of deep, thought-provoking, insight-rich conversations with other people, and by that I meant that I had all these wonderful opportunities to ask people questions and learn from their experiences. The conversations weren’t always bright and sunny. In fact, some of the best conversations were where in addition to asking questions, I also found myself telling stories about how things could be, how things should be.

Oh, and I finished “Me and My Katamari!” Sense of accomplishment. I rarely finish video games, normally losing interest after a while. Maybe this shows that I’m learning how to do that. It helped that W- was also playing it, and that the game was broken down into 5-minute chunks. And it’s fun finishing things well… That’s something I’d like to get hooked on, just like I’d like to build exercise into my daily habits.

And I got started with homebrew development for the Nintendo DS. I’ve gone through some of the tutorials. =) The first thing I’d like to do is build a personal finance module for DS Organize. Good time to get back into embedded C programming. And it’s the ARM architecture, too, just like when I was programming on the iPaq.

What’s up for next week? Christmas and Boxing Day are holidays over here, and I’ll be working on Monday and for the rest of the week. Aside from the wiki I’m doing for work, I’ll also work on my book, and I’ll spend a little time getting in touch with people. My work goal is to finish all the tool recommendations. My personal goal for next week is to review my contacts and either get back in touch with people or archive old contact information. =)